The funding will be used to expand the company’s workforce as it begins real-world testing of the smart lock it announced during the D11 conference in May. The product is also being examined by independent security contractors and updated to include new features like EverLock, which automatically locks a door after it’s been closed. This will delay the product’s release: it was originally meant to reach consumers during the holiday season, but is now expected to ship some time next spring.

“When we unveiled the project at D11, we hoped we would get a good response — maybe we would be shipping a few thousand units by the end of the year,” Johnson says. “But what happened is, we got more than a good response. We got a spectacular response. So we slowed things down; it’s more important that we deliver something right than that we deliver something quickly.”

This makes August the latest hardware company to become a victim of its own success. Most startups encounter problems when their products fail to attract enough attention; hardware startups seem to suffer from a different problem whereby unexpected popularity can lead to delays, issues, and consumer backlash.

Consider Pebble, the most well-funded project in Kickstarter’s history. The company raised far more than it expected, which ultimately led to manufacturing delays and frustration caused by the company’s seeming inability to satisfy the thousands of people who essentially pre-ordered the device before it even truly existed. The product’s spectacular popularity ultimately caused many of its parent company’s problems.

“From my conversations with my fellow friends making hardware, there are definitely scalability challenges,” Johnson says. “Making a prototype that could perhaps be produced in the thousands to making a product that could perhaps be sold in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands is a very different business.”

Hence the delay. August is no longer a small company hoping to inspire thousands of early adopters with its smart lock — it’s now trying to ensure that some 40,000 consumers and “many, many” retailers will be receiving or selling a smart lock that meets or exceeds their expectations. That requires a larger team, more time to test the product, and the formation of partnerships with other Internet of Things startups Johnson expects to announce at CES in January.

“The challenge for many of us hardware startups is, we need to move from being really excited and trying to quickly deliver something to making sure that we in fact can scale and can deliver on the promises we’ve been making,” Johnson says. “It’s a nod to the big consumer electronics companies and what they do. We have to stay nimble and stay creative, but we also need to mature.”

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]